I'm speaking about the dark web. You cannot purchase products there with dollars.

I do it because I'm only one link in that chain. I'm not the guy with a bunch of BTCs wondering who I can sell them to, I'm just doing a single transaction that involves converting to the local currency before making my purchase. In this particular situation, using dollars isn't an option in the first place when BTC is the only currency accepted.

In as much as any given currency is a proxy for any other given currency, correct.

For the same reason that when I go to Switzerland I exchange my dollars for Swiss Francs. Bitcoins are the local currency where I shop.

How is it any different than the government printing dollars which make the claim that they are legal tender? Should you just take their word for it? You have a piece of paper in your pocket that you can exchange for quite a bit of food, but the paper isn't valuable. It's not magic paper, it can't cure hemorrhoids. It's just paper, with little pieces of thread and stuff. It would take several thousand pieces of it to equal the value of 1 log of firewood.

Like anything else, be it little pieces of paper or metal, or hashes and algorithms, or bottle caps, barbie doll heads, marbles, whatever; the true value of something is exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. The prices on the exchanges are actual prices, that is what people are actually willing to pay. That is what a bitcoin is actually worth. Just like dollars and coins.

That being said, a lot of time needs to pass before anyone should seriously consider converting the majority of their wealth to a currency like bitcoins. If the US dollar or any other state-sponsored currency were seeing volatility like what you see with BTC then no one would be keeping their fortune there, either. The reason USD is a better currency at this point to store your money is because right now it is much more stable than BTC. That's really the only reason though.

I think you missed my point. If I want to buy $200 USD worth of goods, and I want to pay in bitcoins, I go out and buy $200 USD in bitcoins (however many BTC that works out to be at the time), I do my transaction, and that's it. It doesn't matter to me if the value of BTC goes up or down the next day. I buy them, and immediately transfer them back out. It's not a currency to hold on to considering the volatility that it sees. But its usefulness as an anonymous currency is still there, I can still go buy my BTC and transfer them out to purchase whatever I want within an hour or however long it takes the transfers to go through. If I do that, then I am immune to everything except the most extreme volatility (huge swings in under an hour).

In other words, when I'm ready to make a purchase using bitcoins it does not matter to me at all what the current value of BTC are. I have used them when they were $100 each, and I've used them when they were $1000 each. I still got what I wanted either way, the system still worked.

What idiot would invest in bitcoins once they saw the price go up to over $1000 and then crash back down? The only people who were smart about "investing" in bitcoins are the people who bought them for fractions of a cent during the first year.

Bitcoins are not an investment. They are an anonymous currency (for certain values of anonymous). Period. Just because some people try to speculate and make money trading in them does not change what their purpose is.

That's rather over-simplified, isn't it? I'm not aware of any laws which are written with the purpose of outlawing consenting adults from exchanging goods and services. It's the goods and services that are outlawed. I'm sure there's some law which is akin to outlawing specifically and knowingly providing a place for people to engage in otherwise illegal behavior.

Bitcoins have not lost any of their utility, at all. If I want to buy something that costs $200 in bitcoins, I go get $200 in bitcoins and then buy it. It doesn't matter how many bitcoins I get for $200, the system is still working exactly like it always has. If someone decides that they want to buy $1000 in bitcoins, spend a fifth of it, and save the rest for another purchase later, they might find out that they don't have enough for another purchase whenever they get around to it. The volatility of bitcoins is just proof that you shouldn't horde them, there's no reason to do that. But the system in general has lost exactly zero amount of usefulness.

Right, and no one ever made any money in the American financial system.

Check your math. The flaw exists in Android 4.3 and older. 4.4 has 39.1% share, and whatever version number version L is has 0.1%. The remainder is 4.3 and older.

Are you suggesting that the current version of Apple's iOS developer agreement does not contain the 6 items that the EFF highlighted?

I'm talking about individuals rather than nations. When someone goes and bombs an abortion clinic, for example, they typically do it because they think they are serving their god, they are doing it for their religion. The Islamists in Paris were following similar beliefs. I'm not trying to argue whether or not the official doctrine of any religion includes killing people. Self-proclaimed members of both Christianity and Islam would both argue for and against their religion allowing them to kill people under certain circumstances, I'm not trying to get into that debate.

I see that you, on the other hand, are in fact trying to have that debate. I'm not your opponent for that debate though, there are plenty of web pages that give arguments on both sides.

I think that was during his speech in the Philippines.

"I call on Islamic radicals to enter the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and kill 12 people with automatic weapons." - Barack Hussein Obama II

My god, you're right. It's exactly what he actually called for. Good call on that, thankfully you're here to point out things that other people would have missed.

Thanks, self-proclaimed Archangel!

I'm missing the part where they say their goal is to spread atheism.

That's about as intelligent as saying that Kim Il-Sung's goal was to nationalize the lumber industry. You're stating individual pieces like they're the entire goal. The purpose of the fighting was not the removal of organized religion, it was a much larger issue that they were fighting for.

You seem to fail to understand that it was one piece of a much larger issue.

It's stupid to even claim that anyone has ever fought a war to spread "an Athiest ideology" in the first place. The defining quality of revolutionary socialism is not the lack of religion, it is control of the means of production. It is not an Atheist ideology, it is a socialist ideology. But you're busy trying to build a case that these people were fighting for Atheism as a religion. Sorry, I don't buy it.

Wow. Yeah, you *nailed* me there, didn't you? Yeah pal you're exactly right, I am absolutely offended that anyone would not be a bigot. Thank you for stating my position so eloquently, and you've got my permission to debate with yourself from here on out, because I'm not going to be a party to this crap. Your agenda is obvious.